The Angst, the Anguish and the Eyeliner
by GildedButterfly
Summary: An autobiography, by Magnus Bane. Everyone's favourite warlock hits a mid-life crisis, and attempts to exorcise his various demons by putting pen to paper. Or in this case, hands to keyboard. DISCONTINUED.
1. Introduction

Introduction

At certain periods in a warlock's life, he will develop a desire to re-evaluate things: to escape the skin of his old life and grow a new one somewhere else (although you understand I'm not referring to a literal process here, for we warlocks are much more civilised than skin-shedding shapeshifters). These periods of change are generally marked by a need to **do something**, it doesn't matter what, anything which will break the monotony our immortality seems to have lead us into. They will usually come at significant times in our lives: perhaps our hundredth birthday, or the anniversary of our soul mate's death, or the day after we have fought in a battle. Or even, if you are something like me, it will be brought on by your partner's nineteenth birthday coinciding with your two hundred and fifty third year on earth.

The evening had begun normally. With my nails sufficiently lacquered and my eyes a glittering work of art, I had considered myself ready to celebrate Alec's youth. I oozed vitality and looked every bit as alive as I had on my own nineteenth birthday. In fact, I had looked better.

(Mental note: I really must remember that whenever I feel that things have gone downhill since my own teenage years, the clothes I currently have on my back are so much more exquisite than the plain threads I sported during the 1770's. All I have to do is stare at myself in a mirror and any problems I have should be veritably bitch-slapped into non-existance.)

There was only one fly in the ointment of that night, and it grew from the fact that, two hundred and thirty four years after my own nineteenth and for the first time in my life, I felt old. The feeling niggled me all through dinner, although I didn't recognise it at first, and finally hit after a few too many shots of Fey's Fury in the underground bar Alec chose to go to afterwards. The rest of the night was spent sobbing into my boyfriend's shoulder, trying to tell him through hiccups that he should leave me and find someone his own age. He grew exasperated around 3am, after I'd irreparably damaged his new white coat with eyeliner, and took me home because I was "killing his buzz".

Waking up in the morning on the couch he had relegated me to after I had been unable to stop weeping, I felt as though I had added another fifty or so years onto my life within the one night. It was then, amidst the sickness of a hangover which I have never quite figured out how to remove magically, that I realised I had hit another one of those periods of change. Fighting the urge to attempt to recapture my youth by stealing a vampire's motorcycle and running away with a nixie half my age, I instead opted to shake things up by looking back over my past and writing it all down in an autobiography of sorts, in some sort of grand cathartic gesture.

It was only after I had decided on this course of action that I realised what I was actually doing:

Writing about life instead of actually living it. Much like an elderly man might do.


	2. The Early Years, Part I: Jeremiah Baker

I, Magnus Bane, High Warlock of Brooklyn, was born Jeremiah Baker.

You couldn't imagine a more sickeningly normal name, could you? Then again, normal was what my birth parents lived and breathed. They had extraordinarily low expectations for me - I was expected to cause my mother some pain during labour (because pain during labour was normal and she'd be normal if it killed her, dammit!) and then pop out of the womb a perfectly healthy, perfectly normal child who would never again cause her any pain with my thoughts or actions. Because I was going to be normal if it killed them. Which in the end, I guess it did.

But I digress.

You might have thought that once my escape from the womb caused such a shock that the healer helping out fainted in a whirl of terror and confusion, George and Mary Baker would cut their losses, accept their goddamned fate and name me Beelzebub for the sheer hell of it (look out, oh reader of mine, I do believe a horrifically bad pun just flew past your head!). That would require a sense of humour though, something neither of my birth parents possessed in any identifiable quantity.

I've never really realised before how bitter I must sound when this stuff is dredged up, but seeing it written down like this is making it rather inescapably clear. My childhood is a story I've only ever shared in detail with one human being (a retort to the Shadowhunters who crashed Chairman Meow's party to make them feel bad about themselves doesn't count) and perhaps therein lies the problem. A visit to Madame Ilgathura, the only existing Downworlder psychologist, should perhaps be next on my 'Ways to Escape Mid-Life Crisis At All Costs' list.

I can barely remember anything of my early childhood, but I can almost definitely promise you that it was far from normal, despite my parents unusual attachment to living an exceedingly mundane life (what's this, another pun? I'm on fire tonight!). For the most part, my memories of it are shrouded in a figurative darkness because my childhood itself was shrouded in a quite literal darkness.

I was born somewhere around Puritan Boston, in the small cottage my parents called home. After the healer who helped at the birth, one Mr Feartrask, had recovered his wits, he crossed himself several times in a veritable frenzy before fleeing from the house. Now as powerful as I have grown up to be (bear in mind that an autobiography is no place for modesty), I did not unfortunately have unlimited abilities when I was only a couple of seconds old, so my re-telling of the scene that followed my birth is not absolute fact, but instead what I have deduced to have happened next from a knowledge of my birth parents' dispositions, and the little snapshots of information shared with me by various people at a later date.

After the healer ran, it took them a while to gather their wits and decide what to do. George, not exactly known for his tolerance, had the near immediate idea of dumping me in the woods or flinging me in the lake. Mary, ever the practical one, reminded him that the townsfolk had watched her pregnant body waddle around for months now and would wonder what had happened to the baby. She thus resolved that they would have to keep me. But they could keep me in such a way that no one would guess at the truth. George heard out her plan before leaving the house quickly to carry it out, in a desperate rush to find the healer and entreat him to keep quiet about what he had seen. Upon arriving at his lodgings, he ran into another member of the town who informed him that Mr Feartrask had returned shortly before in an anxiety of nerves, packed all his belongings and left in a rush, neither explaining where he was going nor why he was leaving so abruptly. Although (naturally) I wasn't present at the time, I can see my father's face so clearly in my mind, attempting to hide his ecstatic relief by smoothing his features into an unrecognisable mask. It was the same look which came into his eyes seconds before he tried to kill me.

Beginning that day, George began to put about the story that I had been born with a disease- one which made the sun's rays harmful to me. Mr Feartrask had run off so quickly, my birth father explained, because they would need a special kind of medicine not available in this area if they ever hoped to cure me. Knowing Feartrask had been so disturbed by me, George felt quite secure in the presumption that he was never likely to return, thus I would never need to step outside the boundaries of the cottage I would grow up to call home.

And so it was that my rather pitiful childhood began- thrown into the darkness and forced to stay there. I'll abstain from going into much detail about the next ten years (otherwise I suspect this autobiography would become a runaway bestseller in the mundane book charts since they seem to adore reading about other people's misery so much, and I would of course have to rename it _A Warlock Called Jez_), but suffice it to say that George and Mary Baker were never kind to me.

The cottage I called a home for the first ten years of my life was a bare and basic one on the edge of the town we lived in, which appeared a lot smaller and more cramped once one stepped inside. The older I grew, the more I remember viewing it as a prison cell and the more I remember living for those five minutes each night when I was permitted a brief walk around the garden area at the back of our house. As the years passed, I became obsessed with the idea of the forbidden, as most children do, and somewhere around the age of nine I began to plot how I would gain my freedom.

I was monitored at all times at that point of my life, as I had been since my birth. I was also convinced, as children often are, of the omniscience of my birth parents and felt sure that any time a thought of the outside world entered my mind, George Baker knew about it and would punish me for it later. And so, although I couldn't see any chance of escape in my imminent future, the thought was constantly in the back of my mind.

Someone somewhere (I'll not say God because, even after two centuries on earth, I still remain clueless as to whether the Big Guy exists or not) must have been watching over me because, just a couple of months later, Mary found that she was pregnant again. The idea ignited an abstract fear in George, as he twisted between feelings of glee that they might finally get "an acceptable child" and terror that life would deal them another changeling, as they had so taken to calling me. He watched over Mary like a hawk during her pregnancy, and was at her side in a second if she cried out in pain (ready for a little exorcism if the occasion demanded it, I have no doubt).

It just so happened that, shortly after my tenth birthday and during Mary's eighth month of pregnancy, she cried out in pain as I was taking my customary garden stroll. George had been standing at the door of the house watching me, but at her call he ran back inside. I stood for a moment, utterly stupefied, as I made a startling realisation: for the first time in my ten years on earth, I was completely, utterly, blissfully alone. It was as I stared at the darkness around me that I felt my feet begin to move, completely of their own accord. A few minutes later I realised I was running, running faster than I'd ever ran in my life and that there was nothing behind me. Freedom was here, it was in my very grasp, and I couldn't quite believe it.

However, displaying spectacular stupidity as ten year olds are sometimes prone to do, I ran headlong into the woods surrounding the town because I truly believed it would be the last place on earth anyone would think to look for me. I couldn't have been more wrong, and it was mere seconds later that I heard the crunch of leaves and heavy breathing of my pursuer. Displaying still more stupidity, I managed to fall headfirst into some kind of ditch in my struggle to run faster and get away.

It was past midnight by now, and the woods were pitch black. I was surrounded by dark trees on all sides; large, unfamiliar shapes which twisted into foul positions as their branches were whipped by the wind. I kept still in the position I had fallen, whimpering internally as I watched the seemingly alive forest with frightened eyes. My heart hammered in my chest, as fast and furious as the beating of a war drum, and I had to swallow a screech of terror as I saw the glint of metal in the corner of my eye, attached to a dark figure stalking closer to me with every step. My birth father, hatchet in hand.

He passed me by without incident, not noticing the ditch in which I lay because of the black night. I remained frozen in fear though, long after the sound of his ragged breathing and the stench of his sweat had disappeared. The sky was beginning to lighten and I was still in exactly the same spot, praying left right and centre for some kind of miracle when I saw him again, making his way back the way he had come. He was uttering curses under his breath and, only a few metres from where I lay, swung the axe into a tree in a fit of rage. A droplet of sweat appeared on my forehead, and my fingers trembled. But he did not see me.

He did not see me.

This thought didn't quite sink in until a long while later, but when it eventually did I had to force myself not to laugh aloud from sheer giddiness. I began to twitch my stiff limbs experimentally and winced at the pain after spending the night so still. Getting up carefully, I began to move slowly through the woods, a child in a daze- the word 'freedom' reverberating through my mind like a mantra. I angled myself in the direction leading away from my hometown, and after what felt like days to me but what could realistically only have been a couple of hours, found myself leaving the woods and embarking along a stretch of land, which I didn't recognise then but realised some time after that it could only be a road, and the first one I had ever seen at that. The sun was high in the sky by this point and I kept to the shaded side of the road, diving into the undergrowth beside it at the faintest sound of human movement. I watched people pass by in amazement (the only other humans I'd ever seen besides my birth parents had always been ones I had watched through the windows of our house) because here were living, breathing human beings moving about their daily lives in what appeared to be a perfectly normal fashion, right in front of me as opposed to behind a pane of glass. My whole life had been shrouded in secrecy, and to see people so carefree and easygoing was monumental to me.

I followed the direction they walked in at a distance, and after a considerable length of time a town came into sight. I entered it in the shadows, and could not help but gasp aloud at the spectacle which unfolded before me. There were people and splashes of colour and sound everywhere, and while I realise now that what I was seeing was a simple marketplace, and a fairly small and common one at that, back then the sight was like a vast carnival of wonder and delight to me.

I slid behind a low building, and noted the table nearest to me was stocked with apples. My stomach growled in recognition, and I stared until I was sure no one was looking before I darted out, grabbed one and ran back to my hiding place.

I was savouring the juicy, slightly bitter taste when two women walked into the marketplace from the same direction I had previously entered. They stopped at the apple table, and conversed with the man behind the counter. I wasn't paying too much attention at this point as I concentrated on munching my way through the apple, but a name caught my ear and I found myself unwillingly looking up.

"…Baker. Had a baby through the night then hung herself from the barn rafters this morning. Whatever is the world coming to?"

The apple hit the floor with a thwack.

--

**Hello all! I just wanted to thank everyone who reviewed the first chapter- it was so nice of you to take the time to write something, especially since what I had written was so short.**

**I really hope those of you who were expecting a laugh riot with this chapter aren't too disappointed…**

**I'm not naturally a very funny person, and though I'll try to insert humour wherever I can (because Magnus himself is so goshdarn hilarious- the name Chairman Meow floors me every time I read it), I'm kind of aiming more for a Great Expectations type thing with this story, although exceedingly more cynical…**

**Anyway, let me know what you think! Is this what you pictured for Magnus?**


End file.
